The purpose of this study was twofold. First, it aimed to present an argument for the inclusion of primary-age children's views in the decision-making process in primary schools. Second, it aimed to explore the potential of primary-age children to contribute to better decisions about their own schooling. The hypothesis is that primary-age children have worthwhile views of schooling that should be introduced into both classroom and school decision-making processes. Authoritarianism, moral development, childrenqs rights and active learning were explored in relation to child participation in decision-making. This study attempted to explore children's views of schooling from the viewpoints of the children themselves. Children kept diaries of school for one week and from these diaries an interview schedule was constructed to allow the exploration of their views. The study shows that primary-age children have views that can contribute legitimately and valuably to decision-making at both the classroom and school levels.

This study explored adolescent girls‟ subjective experiences of being young mothers in school, focusing on their personal and interpersonal relationships within their social contexts. Participants included 15 young black mothers aged between 16 and 19 years from three high schools in Khayelitsha, Cape Town. Conducted within a feminist social constructionist framework, the study adopted an exploratory qualitative structure. Data were collected through life histories that were analysed within a thematic narrative framework. The narratives revealed that the young mothers found motherhood challenging and overly disruptive of school. Although contexts of childcare emerged as pivotal in how young mothers balanced motherhood and schoolwork, these were also presented as characterised by notions of power and control. Because of the gendered nature of care work, the women who supported the young mothers with childcare dominated the mothering spheres. The schools were also experienced as controlled and regulated by authorities in ways that constrained the young mothers‟ balancing of school and parenting. Equally constraining to a number of adolescent mothers were structural challenges, for example, parenting in spaces that lacked resources. These challenges were compounded by the immense stigma attached to adolescent motherhood. The study recommended that the Department of Education work closely with all the parties concerned in ensuring that pregnant learners benefit from the policy. It is necessary that educators are encouraged to shift attitudes so that communication with adolescent mothers is improved.

This case study was conducted in one elementary French-language school in Ontario with 1 administrator, 4 teachers and their culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) students. Through the integration of bhabha’s (1994) notion of Third space, multiple literacies theory (Cummins, 2001; Masny 2009) and by drawing on interviews, observations, and students’ work samples, I conceptualise an alter(n)ative literacies framework to address growing diversity in French-language schools. The term alter(n)ative is developed to express the intertwined benefit of expanding traditional notions of literacy to include alternative language practices and the potential alter-ative effect of re-envisioning the resources children bring to their literacy and language development at school. This thesis argues that teachers can critically (re)interprete official policies concerning Frenchlanguage schools in order to effectively foster students’ alter(n)ative literacies development. In doing so, teachers affirm the plurality of students’ multiple identities as a foundation for their participation within evolving cosmopolitan franco-ontarian communities.

This case study was conducted in one elementary French-language school in Ontario with 1 administrator, 4 teachers and their culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) students. Through the integration of bhabha’s (1994) notion of Third space, multiple literacies theory (Cummins, 2001; Masny 2009) and by drawing on interviews, observations, and students’ work samples, I conceptualise an alter(n)ative literacies framework to address growing diversity in French-language schools. The term alter(n)ative is developed to express the intertwined benefit of expanding traditional notions of literacy to include alternative language practices and the potential alter-ative effect of re-envisioning the resources children bring to their literacy and language development at school. This thesis argues that teachers can critically (re)interprete official policies concerning Frenchlanguage schools in order to effectively foster students’ alter(n)ative literacies development. In doing so, teachers affirm the plurality of students’ multiple identities as a foundation for their participation within evolving cosmopolitan franco-ontarian communities.

Since the American Revolution free public education has been a discussion of political debate. The purpose that such an institution should play in society is a debate fervently argued when the founding fathers wanted to build a republic based on meritocracy. The problem this study addresses is the undefined relationship between the goals of schooling relevant to Georgia and the Georgia Performance Standards (GPS) which is a critical piece to creating a complete systemic view of public schooling in Georgia. The purpose of this study is to investigate the alignment between the GPS and schooling goals. The guiding question and sub-questions are: How well are the GPS, or the intended curriculum of Georgia schools, and each of the various stated goals of schooling aligned? How relevant are the eighth-grade GPS to the latent themes of each of the stated goals of schooling? How balanced are the latent themes of each of the stated goals of schooling in the eighth-grade GPS? Through a historical investigation of the literature and current policy the author establishes the currently relevant goals of schooling which serve as the latent goals for which the method will seek to find evidence within the Georgia Performance Standards. The study employs a quantitative content analysis of a significant section of the Georgia Performance Standards (GPS) looking for themes associated with various stated goals of schooling as indicated by the literature review. The manifest themes, developed from the latent goals of schooling, are incorporated as the dependent variables in the study, while the GPS serve as the independent variable. Neuendorf’s (2001) framework for content analysis is used to develop a new method for investigating the goal-curriculum alignment relationship through new measures of Curricular Balance, Curricular Relevance, and Manifest Theme Presence. This study presents a new visual model to compare a curriculum’s alignment to multiple goals of schooling called the Goal-Curriculum Alignment Measures (G-CAM) model. This study finds that the GPS are strongly aligned to the goals of Americanization, high student test scores, post-secondary enrollment, and national gain, while poorly aligned to democratic participation and social justice. Evidence for these conclusions are discussed and related to the current socio-political literature.

The purpose of this study is to explore high school students’ understandings of achievement and opportunity through their lived experiences which are constructed under a high-stakes testing environment in Korea. This study undertakes a critical analysis of high-stakes testing and its intersectional effects in terms of structure and culture, attending to students’ everyday experiences in testing practices as these are embedded in certain discourses. Recent scholarship reveals that high-stakes testing reinforces a correspondence between socioeconomic status and educational attainment under the neoliberal educational policies of school choice, privatization, and high-stakes testing. In the analysis of educational policies such as the accountability movement, some studies contend that the political and economic discourses underpinning high-stakes testing are effectively hidden behind educational practices ostensibly aimed at raising standards. To date, however, there has been little attention to how students internalize the logic of neoliberal competition and how they experience educational achievement and opportunity structure within a high-stakes testing environment. Drawing on in-depth interviews of high school students from varying economic and academic backgrounds, this study found that students’ experiences of the high-stakes testing environment are influenced by their social class and achievement levels. High-stakes testing does not contribute to reducing achievement gaps between classes but rather reinforces educational alienation as well as opportunity gaps. Furthermore, high-stakes testing, as a cultural practice which affects students’ daily lives and their experience of curriculum and instruction, contributes to the ideological construction of students’ understandings of achievement and opportunity structure. While students experience structural constraints in achievement, they believe in testing as being a fair and equal opportunity. Concealing students’ struggles within structural barriers as well as their contradictory experiences in relation to ideologies of achievement and success, high-stakes testing becomes the medium through which students’ social desires are reproduced. An intersectional analysis in terms of culture and structure of students’ experiences in relation to high-stakes testing can help us to understand how the achievement ideology responds to students’ aspirations and also how those aspirations help this ideology persist. This study urges educational policies to focus on opportunity gaps and to look at contradictions and struggles that students experience in high-stakes testing. / text

Increasingly since the 1990s those of us who are interested in gender issues in education have heard the question: What about the boys? A discourse has emerged in New Zealand, as in other countries including Australia, Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom, that attention spent on addressing issues related to the educational needs of girls has resulted in the neglect of boys and problems related to their schooling. Positioned within this discourse, boys are depicted as disadvantaged, victims of feminism, underachieving or failing within the alienating feminised schooling environment and their struggles at school are seen as a symptom of a wider ‘crisis of masculinity'. This anxiety about boys has generated much debate and a number of explanations for the school performance of boys. One concern, that has remained largely unexamined in the Aotearoa New Zealand context, is that the dominant discourse of masculinity is characterised by a restless physicality, anti-intellectualism, misbehaviour and opposition to authority all of which are construed as antithetical to success at school. This thesis explores how masculinities are played out in the schooling experiences of a small group of 5, 6 and 7 year old boys in two New Zealand primary schools as they construct, embody and enact their gendered subjectivities both as boys and as pupils. This study of how the lived realities of schooling for these boys are discursively constituted is informed by feminist poststructuralism, aspects of queer theory and, in particular, draws on the works of Michel Foucault. The research design involved employing an innovative mix of data generating strategies. The discursive analysis of the data generated in focus group discussions, classroom and playground observations, children’s drawings and video and audio recording of the normal classroom literacy programmes is initially organised around these sites of learning in order to explore how gender is produced discursively, embodied and enacted as children go about their work and their play. The research shows that although considerable diversity was apparent as the boys fashioned their masculinities in these different sites, ‘doing boy’ is not inimical to ‘doing schoolboy’ as all the boys, when required to, were able to constitute themselves as ‘intelligible’ pupils (Youdell, 2006). The research findings challenge the notion of school as a feminised and alienating environment for them. In particular, instances of some of the boys disrupting the established classroom norms, as recorded by feminist researchers more than two decades ago, are documented. Concerns then, that “classroom practices reinforced a notion of male importance and superiority while diminishing the interests and status of girls” (Allen, 2009, p. 124) appear to still be relevant, and the postfeminist discourse “that gender equity has now been achieved for girls and women in education” (Ringrose, 2013, p. 1) is called into question. Amid the greater emphasis on measuring easily quantifiable aspects of pupils’ educational achievement, what this analysis does is to recognize the processes of schooling as highly complex and to offer a more nuanced response to the question of boys and their schooling than that offered by, for example, men’s rights advocates. It suggests that if we are committed to improving education for all children, the question needs to be re/framed so as not to lose sight of educational issues related to girls and needs to ask just which particular groups of boys and which particular groups of girls are currently being disadvantaged in our schools.

This critical ethnography focuses on the practice of an Indigenous-serving charter school in Arizona and how it created space to practice culturally responsive schooling for Indigenous youth in an era of school accountability and standardizing educational reforms. Urban Native Middle School (pseudonym) opened for four years before being closed under tremendous state pressure from high-stakes testing accountability measurements. This study uses data spanning two periods of data collection: archived data collected at the time of the school's operation, and follow-up data tracking educators', parents' and students' experiences after the school's closure. Careful examination of student, educator, and parent narratives about the school during its years in operation illuminate how adults and youth co-authored a unique reterritorializing both/and discourse, building a school community of practice around connections to mainstream standardized knowledge and local Indigenous knowledges. The transformational potential of the schools both/and approach offered students access to strength-based both/and identities. The second phase of the study, which followed educators', parents', and students' into new school environments, illuminates practices of educational negotiation on the part of participants within geographies of limited educational opportunity for Native youth, both urban and rural. With four years of data collection, this study expands understanding of how Indigenous families choose among available educational environments in landscapes of limited school options and policy labels which fail to address the on-the-ground realities of schooling in Indigenous communities. For the Indigenous educators and families in this study, navigating school choice in an era of high-stakes testing reflects an enduring struggle of American Indian education with educational policy. This study's findings suggest that the transformative potential of both/and schooling has positive and wide reaching implications on the school experience of Native youth, and further illuminates the persevering practices of Indigenous educational survivance in seeking access to more equitable, culturally sustaining educational experiences. With implications for practice and policy, this anthropologic case study of an Indigenous-serving charter school considers the powerful impacts of human relationships on student learning and critiques the injustice perpetuated by snapshot accountability measurements which deny students' spaces for cultivating bridges to access imagined futures.

School activities are under constant discussion. This literatur study examines student participation and its relationship to democracy mission and the factors that contribute to students marginalized in school. The study also intends to examine the relationship between intersektionall analysis and the limitation of opportunities for student participation in school. The study results problematize the relationship between student participation and school democracy quests, this by highlighting the challenges and difficulties the school faces. Our results also strengthen the relationship between the study theory and marginalization of students and the limitation of opportunities for student participation.

This study explored adolescent girls‟ subjective experiences of being young mothers in school, focusing on their personal and interpersonal relationships within their social contexts. Participants included 15 young black mothers aged between 16 and 19 years from three high schools in Khayelitsha, Cape Town. Conducted within a feminist social constructionist framework, the study adopted an exploratory qualitative structure. Data were collected through life histories that were analysed within a thematic narrative framework. The narratives revealed that the young mothers found motherhood challenging and overly disruptive of school. Although contexts of childcare emerged as pivotal in how young mothers balanced motherhood and schoolwork, these were also presented as characterised by notions of power and control. Because of the gendered nature of care work, the women who supported the young mothers with childcare dominated the mothering spheres. The schools were also experienced as controlled and regulated by authorities in ways that constrained the young mothers‟ balancing of school and parenting. Equally constraining to a number of adolescent mothers were structural challenges, for example, parenting in spaces that lacked resources. These challenges were compounded by the immense stigma attached to adolescent motherhood. The study recommended that the Department of Education work closely with all the parties concerned in ensuring that pregnant learners benefit from the policy. It is necessary that educators are encouraged to shift attitudes so that communication with adolescent mothers is improved.